jeering world. He sees millions of animals
carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and
appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are
necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the
unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe
which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its
body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it
comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour
rather abruptly deserts him.

In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times
and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a
vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the
fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the
mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went
to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the
grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence
of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than
harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in
aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an
endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of
the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be
convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that
they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again. That the
whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that
of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth
was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous,
they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were
taught that death was humorous.

There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what
we call Nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that Nature is beautiful
in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, is only one
of her charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most
valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and
defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise
of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a
London railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse
kindliness and honesty, and the lover in 'Maud' could actually persuade
himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love's name. Has
the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig
grunting? It is a noise that does a man good--a strong, snorting,
imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through
every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth
itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest,
the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature--the value
which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as
grotesque, as solemn and as happy as a child. The mood does come when we
see all her shapes like shapes that a baby scrawls upon a slate--simple,
rudimentary, a million years older and stronger than the whole disease
that is called Art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into
a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple
that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and
levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird
standing on one leg; the moon is like the eye of a Cyclops. And, however
much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or
contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for
ever.

* * * * *

A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY

It is a very significant fact that the form of art in which the modern
world has certainly not improved upon the ancient is what may roughly be
called the art of the open air. Public monuments have certainly not
improved, nor has the criticism of them improved, as is evident from the
fashion of condemning such a large number of them as pompous. An
interesting essay might be written on the enormous number of words that
are used as insults when they are really compliments. It is in itself a
singular study in that tendency which, as I have said, is always making
things out worse than they are, and necessitating a systematic attitude
of defence. Thus, for example, some dramatic critics cast contempt upon
a dramatic performance by calling it theatrical, which simply means that
it is suitable to a theatre, and is as much a compliment as calling a
poem poetical. Similarly we speak disdainfully of a certain kind of work
as sentimental, which simply means possessing the admirable and
essential quality of sentiment. Such phrases are all parts of one
peddling and cowardly philosophy, and remind us of the days when
'enthusiast' was a term of reproach. But of all this vocabulary of
unconscious eulogies nothing is more striking than the word 'pompous.'

Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous.
Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids
blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring. And
public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to
teach. Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great
deal more public than they are at present. We are too fond nowadays of
committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence. We
have forgotten the old and wholesome morality of the Book of Proverbs,
'Wisdom crieth without; her voice is heard in the streets.' In Athens
and Florence her voice was heard in the streets. They had an outdoor
life of war and argument, and they had what modern commercial
civilization has never had--an outdoor art. Religious services, the most
sacred of all things, have always been held publicly; it is entirely a
new and debased notion that sanctity is the same as secrecy. A great
many modern poets, with the most abstruse and delicate sensibilities,
love darkness, when all is said and done, much for the same reason that
thieves love it. The mission of a great spire or statue should be to
strike the spirit with a sudden sense of pride as with a thunderbolt. It
should lift us with it into the empty and ennobling air. Along the base
of every noble monument, whatever else may be written there, runs in
invisible letters the lines of Swinburne:

'This thing is God:
To be man with thy might,
To go straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live
out thy life in the light.'

If a public monument does not meet this first supreme and obvious need,
that it should be public and monumental, it fails from the outset.

There has arisen lately a school of realistic sculpture, which may
perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a
movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy
pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and
depressing object in the universe--far more hideous and depressing than
one of Mr. H.G. Wells's shapeless monsters of the slime (and not at all
unlike them)--is the statue of an English philanthropist. Almost as bad,
though, of course, not quite as bad, are the statues of English
politicians in Parliament Fields. Each of them is cased in a cylindrical
frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking
garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or a light
great-coat. Each of them is in an oratorical attitude, which has all the
disadvantage of being affected without even any of the advantages of
being theatrical. Let no one suppose that such abortions arise merely
from technical demerit. In every line of those leaden dolls is expressed
the fact that they were not set up with any heat of natural enthusiasm
for beauty or dignity. They were set up mechanically, because it would
seem indecorous or stingy if they were not set up. They were even set up
sulkily, in a utilitarian age which was haunted by the thought that
there were a great many more sensible ways of spending money. So long as
this is the dominant national sentiment, the land is barren, statues and
churches will not grow--for they have to grow, as much as trees and
flowers. But this moral disadvantage which lay so heavily upon the early
Victorian sculpture lies in a modified degree upon that rough,
picturesque, commonplace sculpture which has begun to arise, and of
which the statue of Darwin in the South Kensington Museum and the statue
of Gordon in Trafalgar Square are admirable examples. It is not enough
for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it
must be striking; it must be in the highest sense of the word
sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the
stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the
longest and blackest catalogue has been made of all our crimes and
follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.

The two modes of commemorating a public man are a statue and a
biography. They are alike in certain respects, as, for example, in the
fact that neither of them resembles the original, and that both of them
commonly tone down not only all a man's vices, but all the more amusing
of his virtues. But they are treated in one respect differently. We
never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the
sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of
the most important part of a man's existence. The sculptor does not work
at this disadvantage. The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an
eminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the
public;